Gunmen on the outskirts of Potiskum, a northeastern Nigerian city of 200,000, have killed four Christians who were fleeing the area in the wake of previous attacks. The Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram is suspected of carrying out the latest attack.

Thank you for linking to this story Father which is always buried in our Western news media or, when the Christians do fight back, reported as “sectarian strife” as if the two sides were equally deadly supremacists. In our press, Moral Relativism never rides out without her sister Moral Equivalency.

My neighbor is Nigerian. The Igbo people lost their fight for a free Biafran Nation when I was a teen and thought I had better things with which to be concerned. Now, 40 years later I send not to know for whom the bell tolls…

I follow JihadWatch, as some here do and yesterday and the day before, I counted no less than 12 Christians killed this week in persecutions. Some were running away from their tormentors, some were coming out of Church. I wish the Pope was canonize all those Catholics killed by Muslims in the past five years en masse.

As to the phrase “sectarian violence”, it is a false statement and covers the fear which journalists have of Islam. If we do not get over this fear, we shall find ourselves in dhimmi-land.

I foresee this happening on a much more frequent basis… and not just at the hands of Moslems. While I am sure Islam has caused the martyrdom of its fair share of Christians over the centuries (who refused to become apostate to save their lives), looking back at the history of the 20th century, it was secular humanists and atheists who killed Christians numbering in the millions. These ideologies have not gone away, and are on the ascendancy, although our Holy Father is doing all he can to fight the rising tide.

Being prepared for what is coming is more important than ever as time is shorter than ever. Make sure your soul is prepared by frequent reception of the Sacraments,… you know… those things that Fr Z is always reminding us of… confession and Mass attendance. Frequent utterances of the prayer to St Michael might very well be appropriate. Make sure your body is ready by proper nutrition and exercise. And make sure you have adequate food and supplies in store to see you and your family and friends through the tough times ahead. I believe in being armed, the better to protect my family and to, hopefully, resist… but that is a personal decision that each must make for themselves.

Keeping enough food on hand to allow you and yours to survive may seem a daunting task… especially if you have teenage boys in your home. lol But by gradually adding to your pantry on each trip to the grocer it can be broken down into more easily managed segments. Store the foods you normally eat… it makes the change easier to accept if ones diet remains a constant. The ability to purify drinking water is also a necessity. Keep in mind that one should plan on one gallon per person, per day… at an absolute minimum. Again, it may seem overwhelming, but breaking it down into smaller increments helps the psychological shock of just how much one needs to do to be even minimally prepared.

I suggest keeping a pack/duffel bag ready with a minimum of 72 hours of food, water, clothes, shelter, bedding and fire making tools… I also keep a prayer book, rosary and holy water in my bug out bag. Think down the road… contemplate what you may feel to be the unthinkable. What happens if you have 1 minute to grab whatever you can before having to leave your home forever. We keep INCH bags (I’m Never Coming Home bags) prepared which would allow us to survive and hopefully start over.

And, most importantly, consider how you will, realistically, face your martyrdom. Not a Hollywood idealized martyrdom, but the horrid, painful affairs they usually turn out to be. And not your stoic, John Wayne reaction, but how you will react to the imminent death of yourself and your family. I recommend reading St Alphonsus de Liguori’s “Victories of the Martyrs.” While St Alphonsus does tend to embellish his accounts of the blessed martyrs and their responses to their tormentors… but it gives me solace and hope that if my spiritual forbears could face their martyrdom with courage, so might I should it come to that.

Sorry to blather on, and sorry to pound this pulpit, Father… but I believe it to be very important to be prepared on all fronts for what I believe to be coming… spiritually, philosophically, mentally, materially and physically. As is often said in preparedness circles… pray as if everything depends on God, but prepare as if everything depends on you. These martyrdoms won’t be confined to Africa or Asia or the Middle East… don’t allow you and yours to be caught unawares. Jesus, Mary and Joseph… pray for us.

Andy Lucy,
I certainly believe in being prepared, but the concept of a “bug out plan” has some problems.
Where is one going to “bug out” to, exactly? Friends or relatives (no matter how good their expressed intentions when the panic’s not on) may well not welcome your showing up on the doorstep in the midst of a crisis with minimal supplies and more mouths to feed.
And, as my dear old dad said back in the 70s when the “survivalist movement” was making news, “Can’t do it. Still have my appendix.” So do I (and actually, he still does too).
I’m a believer in “SIP” – Shelter In Place. And in coordinating with neighbors to protect the block. That worked surprisingly well after Katrina.

Shelter in place is my first preference, naturally, as I really like my home… however, the moment I become wedded to a plan, I open myself to the possibility that it may become impossible to implement said plan. I try to plan for every eventuality that I can possibly think of, at least minimally.

Bugging out requires prior planning… you cannot just show up on someone’s doorstep. However, having a pre-established bug-out location gives you options that you lack from relying solely on sheltering in place. The planning involved is usually best done by establishing a Mutual Aid Group, or MAG. People with like ideals and motivations. And group survival is always better than attempting to go it alone.

And while sheltering in place has its advantages, especially with regard to natural disasters, if one examines the 20th century’s history of warfare and how civilian populations are impacted, one sees that upheaval and displacement was the norm, not the exception. Being prepared to leave immediately can very well be the difference between surviving and meeting your martyrdom due to a lack of preparedness.

To Andy Lucy-
You forgot the most important thing. Lots of guns and ammunition to kill anyone who tries to take away your carefully hoarded food and supplies from your Mutual Aid Group or family. I am not a father so I’ve no proper input perhaps, but I’d rather be in ‘steerage’ when the Titanic goes down with the poor Catholic immigrants getting absolution rather than on deck singing Anglican hymns (much as I love Nearer My God to Thee) or in the lifeboats.

I mentioned it. The choice to fight back is a personal one. And I resent the use of the term “hoarded.” If I take the time to prepare for an uncertain future, it is, apparently, only hoarding to those who refuse to make plans. That is your choice. And, perhaps I am dense from too much Thucydides, but what in the world do you mean by your Titanic analogy? That anyone who decides to try to survive is… less than a true Catholic? Please tell me you did not mean that. Or that a “true Catholic” will just give up, and not fight back? Please amplify.

I am a husband and a father… and, indeed, a son and a brother. And I feel it my duty to make sure that my family is as prepared as possible for an uncertain future. And to make provision for as many others as I possibly can.

to Andy Lucy, thank you for the very handy check list. I had not thought of half those things so you definitely helped me. You are an excellent example of why fathers are so important in a family. You have an excellent handle on the provide and protect as is proper to your station. i think the fact the -digdigby- is not a parent speaks volumes about his point of view. We need to be very patient because people without children have absolutely no idea how becoming a parent changes your entire outlook on life. As for persecutions we have been told by Our Lord to expect them and to prepare. We as parents have a great responsibility to protect the lives entrusted to us.

The virtue of preparedness is lauded in the story of Joseph and the grain storehouses, in the example of the Valiant Woman, in Jesus’ admonition to be like the householder who can bring out new stores and old, and many others.

The virtue of trusting in God and not worrying too much about the morrow is also lauded by Jesus.

It would be nice if every parish had an emergency plan, though. In time of danger, it’s often a priest’s job to stick around and help, so you might as well have some kind of plan on how to do it.

You are probably right. And you are most definitely smarter and more far-sighted than most of us. I can certainly see the evolutionary value of someone like surviving rather than someone like me. Go for it!

Civilization is fragile. Stories like this one out of Nigeria show that, as do natural disasters. It’s shocking how quickly it can all just collapse. The social engineering experiments in our country show that people take for granted the role of Christianity in creating a stable, free, civil society.

Many of the most doggedly atheist “secular humanists” don’t realize how “Christian” they often still are in the values they claim to uphold, and they won’t realize it until they experience a society that has largely succeeded in eradicating Christianity from public life (China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, or Boko Haram’s reign of terror). The secularists’ ethical position erodes, however, since they have made man the arbiter of human rights and taken up veto power over natural law. There can thus always be exceptions, and exceptions beget more exceptions. The reference point for goodness becomes convenience and pleasure, and eventually a replacement personality cult or ideology will step up to fill the vacuum in a cycle of decadence and futility.

In that vein, I have thought less about Andy Lucy’s scenario above than another, though the SCOTUS decision puts a handy stick in the spokes of the Obama administration’s bike: at what point in the erosion of freedom of conscience and religion would living in this country become intolerable?

One way or the other, civilization is fragile, and people take for granted Christianity’s role in keeping it going.

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Grant unto thy Church, we beseech
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Food For Thought

“The legalization of the termination of pregnancy is none other than the authorization given to an adult, with the approval of an established law, to take the lives of children yet unborn and thus incapable of defending themselves. It is difficult to imagine a more unjust situation, and it is very difficult to speak of obsession in a matter such as this, where we are dealing with a fundamental imperative of every good conscience — the defense of the right to life of an innocent and defenseless human being.”

- St. John Paul II

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“Only one sin is nowadays severely punished: the attentive observance of the traditions of our Fathers. For that reason the good ones are thrown out of their places and brought to the desert.”

For your consideration…

"One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting."

- C.S. Lewis

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Additional Food For Thought

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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